Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 418 pages; 2022. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson.
First published in 1952, Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays is a big-hearted and rambunctious tale chronicling the ups and downs of two Italian families during the Second World War and the events leading up to it.
It’s not an easy book to like — it’s so richly detailed as to be almost impenetrable, not helped by next to no paragraph breaks — but it is wholly immersive once you commit time to it and let the family dynamics and political dramas work their magic.
There’s no central character to steer you through the complexity of lives being lived, first under Fascist rule, then under German occupation, although the blurb on my edition claims it’s Anna, the quiet, teenage daughter of one of the families.
But it could just as easily be Cenzo Rena, the kind, sociable, well-traveled man more than 30 years her senior, whom she marries to protect her reputation when she falls pregnant to the self-interested boy across the road. (That boy cruelly fobs her off with a 1,000-lire note to arrange an underground abortion, as if that will solve everything.)
Regardless, the narrative offers enough drama and intrigue to keep the reader turning the pages without a main protagonist.
A novel in two parts
The story is divided into two parts. The first sets the scene and introduces us to a vast cast of characters — two families who live across the street from one another in Northern Italy — and highlights how their secret work to oppose the Fascist regime in the 1930s unites them despite the disparity in their wealth (one family owns a soap factory, the other is headed by a middle-class widower with little disposable income).
They were talking politics in the sitting room, they were once again doing a dangerous, secret thing […] They wanted to overthrow the fascists, to start a revolution. Her father had always said that the fascists must be overthrown, that he himself would be the first to mount the barricades, on the day of revolution. He used to say it would be the finest day of his life.
The second part focuses more on Anna and Cenzo’s marriage and charts what happens when 16-year-old Anna swaps her family world for a new life in a new town with a man she barely knows.
Cenzo Rena told her they would get married at once, in a few days’ time, and then they would leave at once for his own village, he pulled out a map of Italy and showed her where his village was, far away where the South began. There the baby would be born and no one would ever know that the father of the baby was not himself, Cenzo Rena.
Later, when the Second World War arrives on their doorstep, Cenzo does his bit to help Jewish internees who are fleeing the North and hiding out in safer nondescript villages in the South. In fact, Cenzo is a rather influential figure in San Costanzo and has the ear of not just the local policeman but many of the contadini (peasants) who live nearby.
The personal and the political
This richly drawn novel manages to successfully show how family dynamics and the minutiae of daily life play out against a broader backdrop of political upheaval and uncertainty.
Ginzburg successfully shows how the Italians, confronted with war and its associated violence and food shortages, continued to live their lives as best they could. References to the German advancement across Europe, the fall of Mussolini and the rumors of Jewish persecution are mentioned almost in passing, but for the reader who has the benefit of hindsight, it is hard not to feel the chilling hand of history.
All Our Yesterdays offers up a highly personalized view of war and its impact on ordinary people. My edition comes with an introduction by Sally Rooney, who describes it as a novel that does not turn “its face away from evil”:
Like any story of the Second World War, it tells of almost unbearable grief, loss, violence and injustice. But it is also a story about the possibility of what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences.
For a far more eloquent review than mine, please see Jacqui’s review at JacquiWine’s Journal. Radz has also reviewed it at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.
This is my 11th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it in Readings Hawthorn on a sojourn to Melbourne in March of this year. I had previously read Ginzburg’s 1947 novella ‘The Dry Heart’ so was eager to read more of her work.
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I am a book obsessive who has been charting my reading life online since the early 2000s. I review modern and contemporary literature, mainly from Australia and Ireland, but with a nod to other regions of the world, too.
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